Schoolgirls fight aliens with the power of science! When an alien invasion targets a private school after hours, only the members of the Science Club stand ready to defend their homeworld from the leafy menace. Gather up your team of specialists and face off against monsters in classic console turn-based combat.

About This Game

Schoolgirls fight aliens with the power of science!

When an alien invasion targets a private school after hours, only the members of the Science Club stand ready to defend their homeworld from the leafy menace. Gather up your team of specialists and face off against monsters in classic console turn-based combat. Your journey will take you through time, space, and paradox to alien worlds and beyond.

Features:

Blowing things up with physics and chemistry

Choice of skills to raise, to customise characters as you prefer

Three difficulty levels for those who hate stress or enjoy a challenge

I kind of have a soft spot for underdog games so this one drew my attention. The characters are fun but the further you go the more leveling your characters seems to punish you by greatly increasing point requirements for performing actions while doing nothing to accelerate recovery of said points or providing much in the way of recovery items. The gameplay responsiveness is unreasonably crunchy, and shortly into the game battles just become increasingly numbing repeats of your team against armies of self-replicating enemies that just take too long to clear only to get into another same-same-same fight only moments later, taking even longer as it becomes more costly for your characters to perform their actions. If the repetition doesn't sound like a big deal to you, you may well enjoy it.

Maybe we'll get to see these fun characters in a different game at some point.

Short version: Good characters, but slow and repetitive gameplay that gets slower and more repetitive.

The characters are fun both in and out of combat and each one has some compelling abilities though some are much, much easier to justify than others. The battles threaten to become a grind before you're quite able to unlock something else or run into anything new. A fair amount of the game's length is fake - walking around running into repetitive mob packs. There's also a bit of a balance issue in that there's no renewable source for items so you fashion your party in such a way as to have enough sustain to farm battles for SP. Not surprising then, that of the people who played the game long enough to get back the box of doughnuts (~25%), only slightly more than a quarter (~6.4%) bothered to finish the game.

There isn't all that much of a story either - just a few lines of comedy and simple decision points stuck along a linear narrative. The alien overworld art is conspicuously ugly. The recorded character sounds are actively offensive even if you watch anime. Fortunately, there's an option to turn off the yell-on-attack sounds, but you'll steal hear them screech every time you get hit.

A simple, cute RPG about girls saving the world from aliens using SCIENCE. There really isn't much more to say. If you are expecting a deep, complex game with well developed characters or innovative gameplay, you will be disappointed. But for what it is, I very much enjoyed this game.

The school has been invaded by alien monsters, and it is up to six heroines to save the day. With the power of science, of course!

Science Girls is a classic turn-based RPG, where you explore the map, fight the enemies and gradually uncover what is going on. It also features extensive dialogues that often let you pick protagonist’s response. And not only the girls have distinct personalities, each of them specializes in a particular scientific field, which add to their uniqueness not only in battles, but during the conversations as well.

In short, if you enjoy turn-based RPGs, Science Girls are most definitely worth getting.

Science Girls is an RPG where six girls that study different scientific fields come together to stop an alien invasion.

This game is not good. Really, the only notable things about this game is that the protagonists are female scientists. It's nice to see media that supports women in science and technology. That's it, though. The protagonists are shallow, and offer very little personality beyond their chosen field. They look very similar (uniforms don't help), which makes it tough to remember which one is which, and after a while, I no longer cared. Sadly, the player-controlled character is just as interchangeable as the others, with the only difference being that she wears a dumb mask. Couldn't I have at least chosen which of the six to control? Also, most of the science the girls use is either basic high school knowledge or completely fictional, and I think the dialogue is actually a bit disrespectful to the scientific fields represented (though, as a CS graduate, I have spent time in a computer lab playing Nethack before). As for the story, I found it uninteresting and a bit too padded out with all the battling.

As for the gameplay itself, it's boring and horribly unbalanced. Your characters' basic attacks are worthless. I found I just kept relying on multi-target skills, with the occasional heal. It's awkward that there's no place that I could find to just recover HP/SP... I kept having to do it in battle by putting one enemy to sleep and defending/healing repeatedly. The battle and level up system are really pretty inelegant. This game would've benefited by keeping things simpler (like the Mario RPGs). Also, I hate it with a passion when skills in RPGs become harder to use as you level up. The saving grace is that all six characters are usable in battle and they all receive XP... at least that's one pitfall avoided.

The art is not very good. The pixel work is okay. The illustrations do a poor job of making the girls distinct. The alien homeworld looks particularly bad. As for the sound, well, apparently there's supposed to be some sound? There are options for sound, but I didn't hear any. I turned the volume way up and made sure my speakers were working, but no sound or music. The controls try to work for keyboard, mouse, and controller, but the keyboard controls were crap, and for the mouse, the buttons were a bit small and all over the screen, making it tough to use the mouse comfortably. I also found a number of small graphical bugs as I played through... this game really needed a bit more polish.

I was really hoping to like this game, especially from the publisher that brought us Long Live the Queen (which was great) and Magical Diary (which was not very good, but I still enjoyed it), but for me, this game was pretty much a miss on every level. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone. If you know a small girl who is aspiring to study a science/technology field, have them play a good game instead. I wouldn't want her to think that science is as boring as this game is.